Welcome to my photo travel blog. I am a landscape and night photographer who conducts photography workshops in some of America’s most exotic landscapes.
I just completed a travel guide to the best landscape photography locations in Southern California, to be available in September 2015.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Tioga Road in Yosemite National Park Open to All Vehicular TrafficThursday, June 29, 2017

Tioga Road will open for Bicycle and PedestrianUse on Wednesday, June 28, 2017

The Tioga Road in Yosemite National Park (Highway 120 through the park) will open for the season to all vehicular traffic beginning at 8:00 am on Thursday, June 29, 2017. There will be limited visitor services available from the Tioga Pass Entrance Station to Crane Flat. Tioga Road will open for bicycle and pedestrian users at 8:00 am Wednesday, June 28, 2017.

All visitors on the road are encouraged to use caution as there may be dirt, debris, and water flowing over sections of the road. Visitors are encouraged to keep an eye out for maintenance vehicles working on the roadway.

There will be minimal services available along the Tioga Road for several weeks. There will be no drinking water. Visitors should use the vault and portable toilets located along the roadway to help protect water quality in the Tuolumne River watershed. Food service and lodging are not available along the Tioga Road. There is no mobile phone service at this time and 911 emergency calls will not be operational. There are no gasoline services available along Tioga Road. Visitors can purchase gasoline in Lee Vining and at Crane Flat.

For maps and visitor information, visit the Tuolumne Meadows Wilderness Center, open from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm, the Big Oak Flat Information Station, the Yosemite Valley Visitor Center, and the Mono Basin Scenic Area Visitor Center in Lee Vining.

Tamarack Flat Campground is the only campground that is currently open along Tioga Road. This campground is first-come, first served and fills early in the day.

Anyone planning to hike or backpack near Tuolumne Meadows and in all high elevation areas of Yosemite should be prepared for winter hiking and camping conditions. Trails are still impacted by snow and ice. River crossings are high and swift moving. There are several high water areas currently impacting the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and the John Muir Trail (JMT) in Yosemite National Park. Trail conditions may vary at any time.

When driving in the park, motorists are urged to drive slowly as bears and other animals are active and may be present on the roadway.

Sunday, June 11, 2017

When the Mono County Economic Development, Tourism, and Film Commission wanted to put its best foot forward with a publisher designing a magazine for global film location scouts, they turned to Eastern Sierra photographer Jeff Sullivan. A landscape photographer and guidebook author living at Topaz Lake, Jeff has led dozens of photography workshops for night photography at the local ghost town of Bodie, as well as landscape photography workshops in the broader Eastern Sierra region of California, especially in the Mono Lake to Tioga Pass to Mammoth Lakes area of Mono County.

The publisher, Boutique Editions, liked forwarded samples of Jeff's work so much, they selected the Bodie image above for the cover of Location International 2015! The magazine is launched each year at the Festival de Cannes in May. The publicity enjoyed by Mono County continued from there:"The magazine is distributed to 15,000 movie professionals worldwide, and is also available at Locations Trade Show in LA; Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity; Berlinale; MIPTV and MIPCOM; Sundance Film Festival, Utah and at AFM in Los Angeles."

Producing stunning photos of locations is nothing new to Jeff. He wrote a 320-page guidebook to the best photography locations in California from Mono County and Yosemite to San Diego: "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South". Locations, and great photos of them, are exactly what he focuses on.Using the proceeds from the sale of this book to fund the creation of in-depth regional guides, he's on a mission to help you discover "the best of the West"!

The popularity of photo sharing and social media sites in recent years had given him excellent opportunities to showcase his work. Participating on Flickr since 2006, he is one of the most-followed photographers on this site popular with serious photographers, with over 45,000 contacts and an average of about 10,000 views per day.

Posting his images on the new Google+ social media site in 2011 as he worked on his guidebook earned him a Top 100 ranking on the site in the site's first two years, amassing nearly 2 million contacts. At least one of the common beliefs about social media post success id true: competent photos really do give social media posts a huge boost! This helped Jeff succeed with his photography workshop business, since a post's reception on Google+ has been determined by Internet marketing consultants to be the #1 factor in helping a site achieving favorable placement in Google searches.*

* It's puzzling that many organizations invest in maintaining social media activity, but don't pay more attention to the quality of the photography in their posts! That's like entering an auto race at Laguna Seca Racetrack in a Honda Accord. Unless you drive a track-ready Porsche, your family car has no business running with race cars. Similarly, investing in online marketing activity but using consumer-quality photography will cause your investment in marketing on the Internet to under-perform against the competition as well. If you're going to compete with the best in the world at anything, including getting your social media posts noticed with the lowest possible investment of time, put your best foot forward and don't skimp on high quality, eye-catching images!

Mono County and Boutique Editions weren't the only organizations noticing Jeff's work in 2015. A travel company in the U.K. noticed his work and named him a "Top 100 Travel Photographer in the World 2015". Upon his book release in late 2015 he took a celebration lap of the Western U.S. and Canada, and one of his photos from Yellowstone National Park won an Outdoor Photographer Magazine "iPhone and Instagram" contest.

Award-winning landscape photographer and astrophotographer Jeff Sullivan has been exploring the American West for four decades. Honing his DSLR photography since he took a 35mm darkroom photography class in eighth grade, Jeff started his freelance photography business in 2006. He has led dozens of photography workshops in Yosemite, Death Valley, the Eastern Sierra and the historic Wild West ghost town of Bodie, California.

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I'm an award-winning landscape and night photographer, workshop instructor, and author. I have been exploring the American West for four decades. I entered a career in digital imaging over three decades ago in the Graphic Printing and Imaging Division at Tektronix. I've used digital cameras close to 15 years. I am an avid traveler and prolific photographer, sharing new work daily for the past 10 years (as Internet availability allows, as I travel).

For the past five years, I have been recording my favorite 300+ locations in California from Yosemite to San Diego, to share them with you in my new book, "Photographing California Vol. 2 - South", now available in bookstores, on Amazon.com and via my blog.

Ansel Adams

Marcus Aurelius

"When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breath, to think, to enjoy, to love."

John Muir

"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike."

Ansel Adams

"I hope that my work will encourage self expression in others and stimulate the search for beauty and creative excitement in the great world around us"

Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It":

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.I am haunted by waters.”

John Muir

"You may be a little cold some nights, on mountain tops above the timber-line, but you will see the stars, and by and by you can sleep enough in your town bed, or at least in your grave."

Henry David Thoreau

"The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time."

Edward Abbey

“High technology has done us one great service: It has retaught us the delight of performing simple and primordial tasks - chopping wood, building a fire, drawing water from a spring”

Ansel Adams

"There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs."

Henri Cartier-Bresson

"Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on earth which can make them come back again."

Gary Snyder

"Practically speaking, a life that is vowed to simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness."

Henry David Thoreau

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life..."

Georgia O'Keeffe

"Come quickly. You mustn't miss the dawn. It will never be just like this again..."